Someone doesn’t like windows because they put ads in their start menu: aww you’re sweet

Someone doesn’t like Ubuntu because they put ads in their start menu: hello, human resources?

Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

“Prepare derivative works” means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. “Entertainment” or “because I like the series and these characters” are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

This is not how “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work” part of fair use works.

A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn’t matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word “potential” in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said “no”. Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.

People are allowed to write fanfic and make fan movies and whatnot. The line isn’t crossed until money changes hands.

This is completely wrong. A company is fully within their rights to issue you a cease and desist for fan works. Some companies, like Disney and Nintendo, do this all the time (though sometimes people are able to fly under the radar).

If you see a free fan game or fan work of anything it’s completely at the mercy of the company that owns the IP. If it’s not taken down it’s either because the company is cool with it, not aware of it, or can’t be bothered to deal with it.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

People really have no idea how overbearing IP laws are. Technically even recordings of people playing video games (let’s plays and the like) could be infringing. This hasn’t been extensively argued in court because most game companies don’t want to deal with the PR backlash that forbidding let’s plays would cause (in addition to the free advertising they get). Though, once upon a time that didn’t stop Nintendo from using YouTube’s copyright system to claim videos of their games.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

https://www.slaw.ca/2024/02/07/lets-plays-a-copyright-conundrum/

Windows 7 is as old now as Windows 3.5 was when Windows 7 released.

Amazing how similar movie production is to game development these days.

Delays, whole projects being scrapped and rebuilt multiple times, and fixes being applied over a series of months after release.

I’m going to sound a little pissy here but I think most of what’s happening is that console hardware was so limited for such a long time that PC gamers got used to being able to max out their settings and still get 300 FPS.

Now that consoles have caught up and cranking the settings actually lowers your FPS like it used to people are shitting themselves.

If you don’t believe me then look at these benchmarks from 2013:

https://pcper.com/2013/02/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review-and-frame-rating-update/3/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/review-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-6gb-185/

Look at how spikey the frame time graph was for Battlefield 3. Look at how, even with triple SLI Titans, you couldn’t hit a consistent 60 FPS in maxed Hitman Absolution.

And yeah, I know high end graphics cards are even more expensive now than the Titan was in 2013 (due to the ongoing parade of BS that’s been keeping GPU prices high), but the systems in those reviews are close to the highest end hardware you could get back then. Even if you were a billionaire you weren’t going to be running Hitman much faster (you could put one more Titan in SLI, which had massively diminishing returns, and you could overclock everything maybe).

If you want to prioritize high and consistent framerate over visual fidelity / the latest rendering tech / giant map sizes then that’s fine, but don’t act like everything was great until a bunch of idiots got together and built UE5.

EDIT: the shader compilation stuff is an exception. Games should not be compiling shaders during gameplay. But that problem isn’t limited to UE5.

This is a symptom of the absolutely insane way digital payments work.

You give a company your card details and they’re able to charge whatever they want, whenever they want, by default. That’s like paying at a restaurant by handing the waiter your entire wallet and telling them to take out the cost of the meal.

Well, Fromsoft had a good run.

Maybe we’ll get one more game out of them.

I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.

Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.

Yeah, the studio that developed Prey (a dumbass name that zenimax forced them to use) went on to develop Redfall after Microsoft bought them.

Clearly they were a bunch of idiots before the acquisition who had no idea what they were doing, and the only problem afterward was that Microsoft didn’t boss them around enough.

I learned better in 2012 when they tried to put an Amazon search bar in their start menu, the same thing people are complaining about with windows today.

If I wanted to use corposhit I would have stayed with windows.

Solar panels aren’t worth it for a normal EV, but supposedly the Aptera is so small, lightweight, and aerodynamic (with that teardrop shape) that they actually add a significant amount of range.

It’s intentionally stupid, which is why it’s not a permanent change.

They just want people to talk about it, send pictures of it to their friends, etc, and be an avenue for reminding people that goldfish crackers exist.

There’s little to be gained in trying to make current-day nations pay reparations for things that their ancestors did.

“We will not blame [King George] for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”.
-James Connolly

How about we look forwards, instead?

How about we look at the present? Because colonialism isn’t over. People are still suffering from it right now. The global south is still actively being colonized and exploited right now.

You can’t drive a knife into someone’s ribs then say “what’s in the past is in the past, we need to look forward instead” when your hand is still holding the blade. How can you hope to start the process of healing if you haven’t even taken the knife out all the way?

Now, I don’t have all the answers for how that healing process is going to work for the world, but I’m pretty sure a billionaire dancing around in a golden hat and velvet robes with a title that says “God made my bloodline special so I can stab whoever I want” isn’t a part of it.

Huh?

They’ve done that periodically for years.

I don’t dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.